Byron's unfinished epic follows the legendary seducer not as predator but as prey, a handsome young man to whom things happen. Sixteen cantos of ottava rima, digressive, satirical, and frequently hilarious, covering shipwreck, harem, warfare, and English high society. Byron wrote much of it in exile in Italy, pouring his genius for conversation into verse that reads like a brilliant dinner companion who cannot stop talking. The poem is about everything: politics, love, hypocrisy, mortality. Byron died before finishing it. What remains is the greatest comic poem since Pope.